According to the UN, Iran executed at least 901 people in 2024

At least 901 people were reportedly executed in Iran last year, including about 40 in one week in December, according to the UN human rights chief.

“It is deeply disturbing that we are once again seeing an increase in the number of people being executed in Iran year after year,” Volker Türk said. “It is high time for Iran to end this ever-increasing wave of executions.”

The total is the highest recorded in nine years and marks an increase of 6% compared to 2023, when 853 people were executed.

Most of those executed were for drug-related crimes, but dissidents and people linked to the 2022 protests were also executed, according to the UN. The number of women executed has also increased.

Turk called on the Iranian authorities to stop all further executions and to introduce a moratorium on the use of the death penalty with the aim of its eventual abolition.

“The death penalty is incompatible with the fundamental right to life and creates an unacceptable risk of the execution of innocent people. And to be clear, it can never be imposed for conduct protected by international human rights law,” he warned.

A spokeswoman for the UN human rights office told reporters that its figures came from several organizations she believed to be reliable, including Iran Human Rights Information Agency (HRANA), Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Hengaw.

on monday According to a report by the Norwegian IHR that at least 31 women will be executed in 2024 – the highest number since death penalty monitoring began 17 years ago.

Nineteen of them were sentenced to death after being found guilty of murder, the report said. Among them is Laila Gemi, who IHR says strangled her husband after she returned home one day to find him and his friends raping her young daughter.

The remaining 12 women were convicted of drug-related crimes. Among them was Parveen Mousavi, who the IHR said was the breadwinner of her family and was paid about 15 euros ($15.60) to transport the medicine, which turned out to be 5 kg of morphine.

Activists say drug-related crimes do not meet the threshold of the “most serious crimes” to which the death penalty should be limited under international law.

Separate report from Hengawa Kurdish rights group, said more than half of those executed last year were members of Iran’s ethnic minorities, including 183 Kurds.

A UN fact-finding mission in Iran said in August that ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by the government’s crackdown on dissent since 2022, when nationwide “Women, Life, Freedom” protests erupted in response to deaths in custody. a young Kurdish woman detained by the morality police for not wearing the “proper” hijab.

Meanwhile, GRANA reported that it had documented the shooting of five juvenile criminals. International law prohibits capital punishment in all cases where the defendant was under 18 years of age at the time of the alleged crime.

According to the human rights organization Amnesty International, in 2023, Iran accounted for 74% of all recorded executions in the world.

These figures exclude China, which Amnesty says executes thousands of people every year, but where execution data has been classified.